[lit-ideas] Re: Civilian casualties in Iraq
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:46:47 -0500
This from Newsweek,
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8679662/site/newsweek/page/3/
Truth is the First Civilian Casualty
July 25, 2005
More pernicious still is the now-famous Lancet
report, ( "Mortality before and after the 2003
invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey" at
http://www.thelancet.com/ journals/lancet/article/
PIIS0140673604174412/abstract) which the respected
British medical journal billed as "the first
scientific study of the effects of this war on
Iraqi civilians." Produced by epidemiologists and
public-health professionals and based on a hastily
taken field survey in various locations in Iraq
led by Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health
researcher Les Roberts, this peer-reviewed article
purported to show that 98,000 more Iraqis died
in the 18 months after the war, based on death
rates in the same areas in the year before the war.
Further, the leading cause of death was violence,
and Iraqis (other than those in Falluja) were 1.5
times more likely to die after the invasion, than
before it. Few of the news reports on this study,
however, noted what even the study itself did:
that the margin of error for these statistics
renders them practically meaningless. In the case
of the death toll of an additional 98,000 persons,
the authors call this a "conservative estimate"
based on the data, but also report a 95 percent
Confidence Interval (CI), of from 8,000 to
194,000, essentially a range of error. In other
words, there is a 95 percent chance that the
excess deaths were between 8,000 and 194,000. And
the CI or Confidence Interval was 95 percent that
the risk of death had increased by from 1.1 times
to 2.3 times after the invasion; 1.5 times being a
midpointâ again, a range that renders it
meaningless. That CI was so broad simply because
the survey's sample was relatively small. As one
of the report's peer reviewers, Sheila Bird, wrote
in a comment in The Lancet, "Wide uncertainty
qualifies the central estimate of 98000 excess
deaths, so that the survey results are consistent
(just) with the true excess being as low as 8000
or as high as 194000." But she goes on to say that
outside data and expert opinion make the 98,000
figure more likely, citing specifically the data
from (where else?) Iraq Body Count.
Again this is before even considering whether
those killed might have been civilians or
civilian-dressed insurgents. The Lancet report
does confirm for instance, that, "Many of the
Iraqis reportedly killed by U.S. forces could have
been combatants." And it added "it is not clear
if the greater number of male deaths was
attributable to legitimate targeting of combatants
who may have been disproportionately male, or if
this was because men are more often in public."
Take another much-cited study, by the group CIVIC
headed by anti-war activist Marla Ruzika, who was
herself killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber (a
detail not usually mentioned in the many anti-war
websites that laud her work). CIVIC's field
surveys counted 1,573 men killed compared to 493
women in the first 150 days of the war â and 95
percent of them died in the first two weeks.
All of these reports are far too politically
motivated for their researchers to use their own
data fairly. The Lancet for instance took the
unusual step of posting its study on its Web site
in advance of publication, on Oct. 29, 2004,
clearly in order to be disseminated in advance of
the U.S. electionsâas the journal even implicitly
acknowledges. In a way, the U.S. administration
has itself to blame. The military has refused to
issue estimates of Iraqis killed in military
operationsâas Gen. Tommy Franks famously declared,
"we don't do body counts." (Mindful no doubt of
how in the Vietnam War, U.S. body counts of Viet
Cong dead at some point exceeded the country's
population.) And when there have been killings of
civilians by U.S. troops, military investigations
have typically been whitewashes, usually with no
effort even made to interview Iraqi eyewitnesses.
This was the case, for instance, in a military
review of the aerial bombing of a wedding party in
Qaim, Iraq, on May 19, 2004. Survivors
interviewed by journalists included some of the
wedding musicians and numerous relatives of the
bride and groom, who both were among the 40 dead.
The military insists to this day that they hit an
insurgent staging area out in the desert, based on
"actionable intelligence", and it concluded its
investigation without having interviewed any of
the Iraqi eyewitnesses. Small wonder so many
people are willing to believe the nonsense being
peddled by anti-war statisticians about the human
cost of this awful war.
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